


Things You Do with People You Like

by lifeonthemurderscene (NotAllThoseWhoWander)



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-28 12:52:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7640974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotAllThoseWhoWander/pseuds/lifeonthemurderscene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about Gerard, Frank, high school, epic guitar solos, comics, brothers, dogs, and the ghost-next-door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things You Do with People You Like

**Author's Note:**

> A high school AU and a ghost story and a falling-in-like story, too. 
> 
> Comments and reviews are always appreciated!

 

 

"Hey," Mikey says, and punches Gerard's upper arm lightly. "Hey. We're here." 

Gerard sits up with a start, jerking his shoulder against the station wagon's seatbelt. He must have fallen asleep somewhere just outside of Belleville, because they had left early and the sun is now high in the sky, casting harsh light over a tree-lined suburban street. 

"That's the new house," Mikey says in Gerard's ear, hanging over the center console from the back seat. He points somewhat unnecessarily; their mom is already standing on the yellow front lawn, talking to an older woman that Gerard guesses is either a neighbor or a landlady. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms and mentally catalogues their new house: one floor, painted a faded gray-blue, white curtains hanging still in the front windows. It's edging on shabby, but Gerard doesn't care. 

He hadn't even wanted to _move_ , had violently protested until he realized that slamming doors and bitching to Mikey wouldn't change their mom's mind, anyways. Renting the duplex in Newark was impossible on one person's income, so if he was going to blame anything it should be the divorce. And while Gerard had gotten all pissed and loud about his frustration, Mikey became withdrawn and sullen, the same way that he had after their parents had separated.

"There better be a basement," Gerard mutters as they climb out of the car, squinting and stretching in the bright sunlight. Down the street, two kids ride bikes in a looping, uneven circle. 

"Maybe you should live in an actual room this time." Mikey folds his arm, hunching his shoulders a little. 

"Maybe you should shut up," Gerard says roughly, and then feels shitty. It isn't Mikey's fault that they're moving, or that Gerard is only a few months into his junior year and he'll have to start over again at a new school with new classmates and no friends. 

Their mom waves them over then, so Gerard and Mikey slouch across the scrubby grass and stand there, hands in their pockets. 

"This is Mrs. Harrison," their mom says. "She owns the house."

Gerard says, "Hey." Mikey half-waves. 

"This is Gerard and his brother Michael." She reaches out and rubs Mikey's shoulder. Mrs. Harrison stares at Gerard and Mikey's black clothing and Gerard's badly-dyed hair, no doubt calculating exactly what kind of satanic rituals they'll conduct in her house. The part of him that listens to Slayer and loves slasher films wants to say  _Don't worry, we won't get too much blood on your carpet, Mrs. Harrison_. The part of him that fears Donna Way's wrath keeps his mouth shut.

Gerard is glad when their mom tells him and Mikey to start unloading boxes—it's a welcome escape from Mrs. Harrison's silent judgement—and they spend the next few hours hauling stuff into the new house. Seeing everything they own packed in cardboard boxes really bums Gerard out; it feels so reductive. He wants to say something to Mikey as they shoulder their way through the door with armfuls of labeled boxes, but Mikey's gone all quiet again and Gerard knows that he's thinking about either the move or the divorce or both. 

There are two upstairs bedrooms and a converted space in the attic; Gerard hasn't seen either, but he isn't keen on living in some creepy attic full of spiderwebs and, like, haunted old dolls. Actually, the thought of sharing any space with a creepy doll is enough to set his teeth on edge.

"I'm gonna check out the bedrooms," he informs Mikey, and waits while Mikey follows him upstairs. The first bedroom is spacious and leads into a bathroom, which means without any certainty that it's their mom's room. The second bedroom, a lot smaller but pretty airy, has a picture window that overlooks the sun-hazy neighborhood. Gerard and Mikey watch their mom messing around with boxes in the trunk for a minute; they've never lived anyplace that had two floors before.

"Dibs," Mikey says after a moment.

Gerard mutters, "Shit," and then, "If the attic is haunted, I'm gonna be really fucking pissed."

"The attic isn't  _haunted_ ," Mikey says, like he's personally lived in the attic for the past five years or something.

"You haven't even been  _up_ there," Gerard says sullenly, but he goes upstairs anyways. The steps are narrow and rickety, but as soon as he steps through the doorway the room just feels  _right_ , somehow. It's a dim space, but afternoon light slants through windows in the roof and cast shadows across the wooden floor. It isn't weird, just creepy enough to remind Gerard of the basement back home. And the light's going to be ideal for drawing. There's an old bed frame pushed up against one wall, and a set of drawers. He skitters back down the stairs to find Mikey and his mom standing in the hallway.

"It's great," he says. "I love the attic."

When his mom smiles and rubs his shoulder, Gerard realizes that she's probably thinking he's fine with the move now. Which he isn't. Thinking about going to a new school actually makes him feel sick with anxiety. But watching Mikey glance around his new bedroom and smile faintly, lips twitching up at the corners, he thinks that it might be something close to worth it. 

* * *

The Way brothers are in the kitchen making coffee at three o'clock in the afternoon when someone pounds hard on the front door.

Gerard jumps; Mikey nearly chokes on a mouthful of Pop-Tart. 

"Jesus  _Christ_!" Gerard peers through the kitchen's grimy window, but only catches a glimpse of someone's wild, frizzy hair.

"Don't answer it," Mikey says, in typical Mikey fashion. _Ignore anyone you don't want to talk to_. "They'll leave eventually."

Gerard considers it, but then the person knocks again.

"Ugh," he says, and goes to open the door. When he turns the knob and pulls back, a teenage boy with an impressive 'fro is standing on the porch and waving.

"Hey! You must be one of the Ways."

Gerard swallows. Perpetually excited, upbeat people kind of weird him out.

"Yeah," he says slowly. "I'm Gerard."

"Cool, cool." The guy messes around with his sweatshirt zipper. "I'm Ray, I live up the street."

Gerard guesses that the polite thing to do is invite Ray in; the impolite and infinitely more Gerard thing to do would be to make an excuse and go be alone for a while.

He says, "Do you wanna come in?"

"Sure!" Ray practically bounds into the house. As he follows Gerard into the kitchen, he says, "It'll be cool to have more teenagers on the block, you know."

Gerard wants to say _Don't get your hopes up, dude_. He bites his tongue.

In the kitchen, Mikey is looking through an old issue of Alternative Press and drinking coffee.

"You want some c—" Gerard begins, but Ray is gesturing towards the magazine and exclaiming,

"Dude! You're into good music?" 

Mikey and Gerard look at each other. Something hopeful sparks in Gerard's chest.

"Uh, yeah." Mikey says while Gerard pours himself a cup of coffee and adds too much creamer. "Are you?"

" _Hell_ yeah." Ray sits down. "Mostly metal, but I dig alt rock and punk, too. Went through a crazy grunge phase a few years ago."

"Smashing Pumpkins?" Mikey asks hopefully, and when Ray nods he actually  _grins_. "I'm Mikey, by the way." 

"Ray Toro. Across-the-street neighbor, kind of." 

The whole interaction makes Gerard a lot less depressed about the prospect of school the next day, especially when he realizes that he and Ray are in the same grade. Even better, Ray is wearing a Slayer t-shirt under his sweatshirt. By the time he leaves, promising to meet Gerard and Mikey before school the next morning, Gerard is  _almost_ looking forward to junior year. 

While Mikey goes upstairs to start unpacking, Gerard drinks another cup of coffee and then digs his cigarettes out of his backpack. He doesn't smoke inside—it pisses his mom off, even though she smokes in the house  _all the time_ —so he opens the back door and goes to take a look at the backyard.

There's no back porch, but a concrete patio with an old wooden table and some chairs. The grass is shin-high and scrubby, like it hasn't been cut for a long time. Gerard stands at the edge of the patio and lights his cigarette, then zones out a little as he smokes. 

A sudden noise startles him out of it. At first he thinks it's a squirrel or something, but when it happens again he looks to his right, towards the chain link fence that divides their new yard from the neighbor's. A shaggy gray dog is watching him from the undergrowth with wide, unblinking yellow eyes.

"Shit." Gerard stares at the dog. The dog stares back. "Hi." 

The dog doesn't move, just watches him with that eerie gaze.

"Do you live next door?" He exhales, letting the smoke curl down through his nostrils. He looks up at the house next door: tall and crooked, the white paint weathered. The yard is a high tangle of weeds and grass and trees, and other plants that Gerard thinks might constitute a garden. He can barely make out the house's lower level through the green. 

The dog lets out a low whine and presses up against the fence. Gerard steps closer. He doesn't know a lot about dogs—the Ways weren't allowed to have pets in their old duplex—but he knows that he likes them better than cats, which he's allergic to. He holds his hand out and makes coaxing sounds.

"Who's your owner, huh?" Gerard starts to kneel down. The dog twitches an ear, looks away from Gerard and towards the crooked house. Gerard follows the yellow gaze to an upstairs window.

It's dark and filthy, but he  _swears_ that he sees a figure standing there, one hand lifting the lace curtain. 

The dog lets out a high, nervous whine and jumps up, slinking rapidly through the yard's undergrowth and vanishing. 

Gerard straightens up and looks back towards the window, but it's empty and dark, as if nobody had ever been there in the first place. 

* * *

 

Ray is  _way_ too chipper about school. 

It's seven-fifteen in the morning, and Gerard is utterly exhausted after a restless night in the attic. Something about all that space makes him feel too exposed after the cramped basement. He isn't used to sleeping in the unfamiliar bed, either. 

"Hey, guys!" Ray is wearing jeans and a Black Sabbath t-shirt, which is pretty cool. He's also grinning and doesn't look exhausted whatsoever, which is less cool but considerably more admirable. "Excited for your first day?"

Mikey shrugs silently. He's already wearing his headphones, which means that he'll probably crank up the music and not listen to another word anyone says. 

"I'm not really a morning person," Gerard explains as they start walking. It isn't a long trek to school, maybe ten blocks or so, but by the time they reach campus he feels sick with anxiety all over again.

"Okay, so we have homeroom and Chemistry together, but nothing else." Ray looks at Gerard's printed out schedule as they climb the stairs to their lockers. They've already bid Mikey goodbye, which translates into watching Mikey press his lips into a flat line and walk to homeroom looking utterly bored already. 

"Great." Gerard's stomach does a nervous kind of swoop. 

"Dude," Ray says, putting a hand on Gerard's shoulder. "It's all gonna be  _fine_."

He sounds so sincere that Gerard thinks it would probably be nothing short of criminal to not believe him.

* * *

 

Unfortunately, although Ray is awesome and listens to good music, he isn't prophetic.

Homeroom is alright, but in second period Pre-Calc, a group of guys wearing letterman jackets push Gerard's desk into the aisle and spend the entire class hissing insults about his hair and black clothes. Then, in third period English, the teacher makes him stand up and tell the  _entire class_ about himself, and when Gerard says that he's from Newark she hears "New York" and he panics and lets her ask a bunch of questions about life in the city before he corrects her.

At least he can eat lunch with Mikey and Ray, although that isn't much of an escape. They sit with some band kids named Bob and Patrick and talk music, but afterwards he has gym class. Back in Belleville, Juniors hadn't had a gym requirement. Apparently here, in the freaky fucking suburbs, they do. 

By the time Gerard gets to Chemistry, he's just about ready to drop out and make his living as a freelance comic artist. Or, like, become a stripper. If people were into awkward, greasy-haired strippers wearing band shirts and black jeans. 

"I fucking hate this," he mutters to Ray. 

"First days of school always kind of suck," Ray says consolingly, and to make Gerard feel better he does a majority of their lab work. Gerard feels slightly better until last period History, where one of the guys wearing a letterman jacket calls him a fag. He'd always dismissed the whole 'jock out to get nerds' stereotype as being just that—a stereotype. Back home, in Belleville, the jocks mostly just didn't give a fuck about nerdy kids. 

It isn't the first time Gerard has been called a fag, but hearing the word puts a sour taste in his mouth. He doesn't tell Mikey or Ray about it, but stays pretty much silent on the way home. As soon as they're in the front door, Mikey says,

"Shitty first day, Gee?"

Gerard nods silently. "Fuck this place."

"No kidding." Mikey rolls his eyes. "School fucking sucks." 

As Gerard ducks through the back door, already fumbling his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, he thinks that this is one of the major differences between himself and Mikey. They both dislike school, always have, but Mikey lacks that total desperation to leave, the itch that makes Gerard want to take correspondence courses or homeschool. 

He sits on one of the chairs for a while, smoking a Marlboro down to the filter, and then lights another because he's still jittery. He looks around for the dog but doesn't see it. 

A slight breeze picks up, but it's still early-autumn warm. Gerard tilts his head back and watches the smoke curl into a cloudless blue sky. 

Later, when he's going inside, he thinks that he sees someone standing in the middle of the neighbor's yard. Just a flash of a figure, wearing dark clothing. Then he blinks, and the figure is gone.

The gray dog is still nowhere in sight.

* * *

 

"Hey, who are our neighbors next door?" Gerard asks during dinner that night. Their new house is on the corner, which pretty effectively narrows it down. Still, his mom just shrugs. 

"I'm not sure, hon." She upends ranch dressing over a salad that Mikey had made, actually impressing Gerard because he hadn't burned the kitchen down in the process. "Why?" 

"Just wondering. They have a dog." 

"You should go talk to them," his mom says absently, even though she probably knows that Gerard would never. Across the table, Mikey looks down and smirks.

* * *

 

 

Of course his bed breaks. Gerard maybe jumps onto it a little too hard, sprawling with his legs all spread out, but he doesn't expect the mattress to go sliding as part of the metal frame clatters and breaks. 

"Shit!" He scrambles up, shoving at the mattress. It's the bottom part of the frame that's broken, but Gerard figures he can shove it back together pretty easily. It doesn't look like the kind of thing that's going to require, like, a blowtorch or welding, just maybe a little brute strength. 

Brute strength is something that Gerard considerably, fantastically, lacks. It takes about fifteen minutes of him sweating on the wooden floor to jam the bed frame back together, and even then he isn't sure if it'll hold. He lies there for a minute, breathing hard, sweat damp on his forehead, still half under the bed.

That's when he sees it—a series of weird, kind of crooked silvery lines in the rusty metal frame. Leaning closer, Gerard makes out a name.

 _Frank_. 

Written in jagged letters, it looks like the work of a little kid; someone making their mark. Gerard imagines a ten year-old boy kneeling in the dusty space under the mattress, scratching his name into the metal with a penknife. It's kind of sweet, in an 80s feel-good movie type of way.

* * *

"Hey, who's Frank?" Gerard asks his mom, because she knows almost everything.

"The hell do you mean, who's Frank?" She's unpacking groceries, putting jars of peanut butter and boxes of pasta in still-unfamiliar cupboards. "I have no idea who Frank is. Who's Frank?"

"I found this name written up in the attic. I guess he lived here before us." 

"Maybe." She reaches out and tousles Gerard's hair; he ducks away. "Put this milk away, baby." 

Gerard mentions it to Mikey next. At this point, he's thinking that if they were living in a horror comic, Frank would be a demon-kid who was going to come out of the walls and steal Gerard's soul. At least then he wouldn't have to go to gym class. 

"Yeah, someone wrote shit like that in my room, too." Mikey is texting someone rapid-fire on his Motorola. "The name, like, Chad. What a shitty fucking name. Who names their kid  _Chad_?"

"Real dicks," Gerard says, and that's that. He doubts that anyone named Chad would become a soul-stealing demon. Unless he teamed up with his brother, Frank, to become a demon duo that stole the souls of high school kids and made them evil jocks. Naturally, two scrappy newcomers would team up themselves and defeat the demon brothers with the power of siblinghood and epic bass solos.

That gives Gerard a great idea for a comic, so he sprints upstairs and spends the rest of the afternoon lost in sketching and inking, a world far more familiar and comforting than the house around him.

* * *

"Hey, bitch." The guy is wearing a varsity jacket and is at least five inches taller than Gerard. He's scowling. "How'd your first day go?"

Gerard, washing his hands in the boy's bathroom, grits his teeth. He isn't exactly sure when his life became a trope from a cheesy high school movie, but he figures that shutting up is probably the best thing to do in this situation. 

"I'm talking to you,  _faggot_." Heavy hands land on Gerard's shoulder, pushing him away from the sink. 

"Fuck you," he spits before he can stop himself. Regret floods his chest immediately, hot and nervous, as the guy kind of sneers.

"You have a mouth on you."

"Leave me the fuck alone," Gerard says. All he can think is  _thank God they're not doing this to Mikey_. Almost as soon as the words are out of his mouth, he feels the white heat of knuckles colliding hard with his jawline. 

He falls hard, lands palm-out on the dirty tile floor. Pain shoots up through his wrist and springs tears in the corners of his eyes. The guy scoffs and shakes his head, like he can't believe that Gerard isn't going to stand up and deck him back. When Gerard just sprawls there, Varsity Jacket leaves.

He eases himself up, trying to levy weight on his right wrist, lifting his aching left hand to touch his jawline. The entire right side of his face is throbbing. When he looks in the mirror, he can see an angry red mark already blooming, blood-red against his skin.

* * *

 

"What happened to your  _face_?" Ray asks as they're walking home, his voice rising with concern. 

"Nothing." Gerard skates his fingers over his lower jaw. It'll bruise and then Mikey and his mom will ask questions. His stomach is jittery with anxiety again; he needs to smoke either a cigarette or a bowl or both. 

Ray says, "Looks like someone punched you," in a hesitant tone. When Gerard doesn't reply, he adds, "Guess Mikey's making friends."

"Yeah," Gerard says quickly, glad for any change of subject. "He told me he was walking home with some dude."

"Pete," Ray says. 

"Maybe."

"No, definitely Pete. Mikey's into cool music and plays bass, so," Ray says, like that explains something. 

Later, as Gerard is about to turn up the walkway leading to his front door, Ray catches his shoulder.

"Hey," he says. "It's not gonna be like forever, Gerard." 

That kind of sentiment, which Gerard usually hates, actually makes him almost dizzy with emotion. Ray is so kind and steady and warm.

"Thanks," Gerard says. "I really mean it."

He really does.

* * *

 

Luckily, Mikey and his mom aren't home yet, so Gerard can go smoke in the backyard and hide his bruise for a while longer. He sits for a few minutes, staring at the impossibly blue mid-autumn sky. It's getting a little colder at night; soon the leaves will start to change. 

After about ten minutes he's smoked his cigarette down to the filter. Gerard's still not ready to go back inside, so he just sits and breathes for a long moment. Then he lights another cigarette. He's about to inhale and let the rush calm him down a little more, but he hears a faint rustling sound from the neighbor's yard. 

The dog—Gerard is on his feet in an instant, thinking that at least this time he'll probably be able to reach through the fence and pet the shaggy gray animal, or at least take a look at the collar and see the dog's name.

"Hello?" He leans against the low chain link fence, cigarette in his mouth, fingers curled around the metal. "Here, boy. Uh, or girl." 

Gerard is wondering if dogs adhere to, like, a human gender binary (probably not) when he hears another sound, like someone moving quietly through the undergrowth.

"Hey," someone says. Gerard just about jumps out of his skin.

He makes a sound like  _aughck!_ and almost chokes on his cigarettes. Thick smoke shoots up both nostrils and he hacks loudly. 

"Jeez, sorry." The voice is young, and male, and pretty close. "Didn't mean to scare you."

Gerard looks up. The kid is standing maybe five feet away, on the other side of the fence. He's short, almost scrawny, face pale underneath a shock of shaggy dark hair. 

"You didn't." He fumbles his cigarette out of his mouth. "I just didn't hear you."

"Most people don't," the kid says, and then smirks a little, like he's just made some private joke that Gerard couldn't possibly understand. As he comes closer, Gerard notices the dark ink curling out from underneath his t-shirt sleeves—tattoos. The guy looks maybe seventeen or eighteen; Gerard doesn't know anybody else his own age with actual tattoos.

They stare at each other between the fence, Gerard's eyes skittering over the guy's tattooed arms and Misfits t-shirt and the rings glinting in his nose and lower lip. 

The guy says, "What're you doing back here, anyways?" 

"I live here now." Gerard indicates the house behind him. "I come back here to smoke sometimes."

"Shit, yeah." The guy steps forward, lacing his fingers through the fence. His knuckles are inked with the letters  _HALLOWEEN_. "Uh, mind if I bum a cigarette?"

"Sure." Gerard passes him a Marlboro Red and his lighter, their fingers brushing. 

"Thanks, dude." He slides the cigarette between his lips and flicks the lighter, inclines his chin. Inhales deeply, leans back. He actually  _moans_ on the exhale. "I'm Frank, by the way."

"Gerard," Gerard says too quickly. He's still a little jarred by Frank's moaning, like this is the best cigarette he's ever smoked. Maybe Frank sees him staring, because he says,

"Uh, it's been a minute since..." he gestures to the cigarette. "You know, headrush and everything."

"Sure," Gerard says. They stand and smoke in silence for a few minutes, Gerard trying very hard not to stare at Frank. This close, the dark circles under Frank's eyes are clearly visible, stark against his skin. 

The thoughts  _he's so hot_ and  _he looks undead_ collide, simultaneous, in Gerard's mind. 

"So you live next door now?" Frank scuffs the ground with the edge of his sneaker, glancing up at Gerard from beneath his shaggy, unkempt hair. "That's cool. Haven't had new neighbors since—"

Then he stops, going silent. Stares at the dirt. 

"Yeah," Gerard says hastily, just glad to fill up the silence. "Me and my mom and my brother. We used to live in Belleville, but it got too expensive, so we moved out here." 

The corners of Frank's lips twitch into a smile. Then he exhales a thin stream of smoke, tilts his chin a little, and nods towards Gerard's jaw.

"What happened to your face?"

Gerard runs his fingers along the skin there, feels it throb a little under his touch. "Nothing."

"Doesn't look like nothing," Frank says, but his tone suggests that he won't push it.

"It's stupid." What kind of self-respecting seventeen year-old let _high school bullies_ push him around and punch him in the fucking school bathroom? "Just some asshole at school."

"Shit," Frank says softly, and his voice is sincere. "You go to Washington High, right?"

Gerard nods. Frank hisses something under his breath.

"Those fucking assholes." He shakes his head, a tendril of smoke escaping from between his lips. "They did the same thing to me, too."

"You go to Washington?" Something bright and hopeful sparks in Gerard's chest. "What grade are you in?"

"Oh, no. Not any more." Frank looks away, squinting in the afternoon light. Disappointment pulls at Gerard's stomach. "Used to, though." 

"Did you graduate?" 

Frank exhales, looking down and shaking his head. "Nope."

He doesn't say anything else, so Gerard doesn't push it. The sun is steadily getting lower in the sky, casting late-afternoon light across the yard in long swaths. Soon the leaves will turn completely, and then it will really feel like autumn. Gerard can't wait. 

Frank eases himself down, sits cross-legged on the scrubby grass by the fence. Gerard does the same. The wind lifts locks of Frank's hair and pushes them across his forehead; Gerard is struck by the sudden and ridiculous urge to smooth them back. He's glad for the fence between them, because otherwise he'd _definitely_ have embarrassed himself at least ten times by now. 

 

"I love the Misfits," he says, and suddenly his voice sounds really loud. Frank sort of giggles. Gerard's stomach does that swooping thing again. 

"Me too." Frank's messing around with Gerard's lighter now, flicking the flame up again and again. "What other music are you into?"

"All kinds of stuff. Like, Black Flag and Metallica and Blur, and REM and Radiohead and—"

"Dude, I fucking love REM." Frank's smiling, and the dark circles under his eyes don't look as harsh. "Nightswimming kind of makes me cry."

"Shit, me too," Gerard says earnestly. He's never met another guy who talks about crying and listening to music, except maybe Mikey, who always pretends that he's just coughing or getting dust out of his eyes or something, anyways. 

"Guess we're meant to be," Frank says lightly, and Gerard is about to say something else, probably  _really_ embarrass himself, but he hears the front door open and his mom shout his name. 

"Oh, I guess they're home," he says. Frank stands up quickly, putting out his cigarette like he's afraid of getting caught.

"You'd better go." 

"Yeah." Gerard climbs to his feet, holding onto the fence. He grinds the cigarette out and pockets the butt. "Guess I'll see you back here again?"

"I hope so." Frank sort of narrows his eyes at Gerard, a half-wink, his lips curling into a slow smile. Jesus, Gerard's heart is jumping into his fucking mouth. 

"Uh, bye," he says awkwardly. He walks to the edge of the patio; he can hear Mikey and their mom inside, making noise in the kitchen.

In the doorway, Gerard turns back to say something else, but Frank has already disappeared into the green tangle of the neighbor's backyard. 

 


End file.
